Sokeefe AU: The Farmer's Daughter

Chapter 18

Sophie had a few things she needed to do that day, and none of them made her particularly excited.

It didn’t help that her nightmare infested sleep the night before had done next to nothing to motivate her. All she wanted was to crawl under the covers and simply exist, for a while, with no responsibilities and no expectations.

And this was before she decided to go to Slurps N' Burps with Keefe.

It wasn't that she regretted that decision, no, it was more along the lines of it made her day even more busy than it already was.

Which was a lot.

She had planned to visit Biana at Everglen, to meet this "Tam" guy she kept talking about, but part of her wanted to call it all off. Just for the fact that Fitz would probably, most likely,  definitely be there, and she was not ready to see him.

But that tied into the second thing she had to do. Talk to Fitz.

It was the last thing she wanted, really. But she knew, knew, she could not keep pushing him off. People like him refused to be ignored, refused to sit quietly and wait for acknowledgement. He'd already hailed her more times than she'd care to admit, and she’d ignored every single one of them.

Mostly out of spite, but still.

She just . . . wasn’t ready, if that made any sense to anyone out there. He stood her up once, and she knew she should hear him out. See his reasons. Ask him why he hadn’t texted her that he wouldn’t be there, why he let her sit there alone for hours until the waiter had to ask her to leave.

And it could be worse, and she knew that, but it hurt so much to like someone and to think that maybe, maybe, they could like you back. Then something like this happens, and to whoever can’t relate, the feeling you're left with is this strange sense of despair. You shouldn't be upset, because maybe you weren’t even dating yet, but you are, and no matter what you do you can't get rid of it. It’s unresolved grief. It's sobbing in the dark without knowing why.

She wasn’t being fair, either, that was something she knew. Ignoring his hails, his texts, not bothering to ask for the explanation she wanted. It wasn’t mature, it was gross and she was overreacting, but . . . well, when problems arose, she tended to hide first and deal later. And right now, she was under the covers of her childhood bed, strangling the neck of her favorite stuffed animal because a monster was in her closet.

She had chores to do that day, too, which could wait until later but was something she wanted to get done before the weekend. And she was also in charge of making dinner tonight.

All together, a lot of things that shouldn’t be hard to do but that she felt like might be anyway.

She eyed Keefe, in front of her, eating a small bowl of cereal. He had gotten it himself, with a few directions from Sophie as to where everything was, and everything had long since gone silent in light of Sophie’s offer.

Distantly, Sophie realized she felt almost responsible for Keefe. In an overprotective, worried for him way that she didn't care to explain to herself. And part of her wondered if that was the reason she had offered to take him somewhere. She wanted to make sure he ate. She wanted to watch how he acted in public, how he responded to her uncle’s crazy store.

But most of all, she wanted to know about his parents.

It wasn't hard to come to a conclusion on the matter. She had already reached one, the same one, a dozen times over, and each time she resisted the urge to hail Alden and make him talk to the Council, to open up a court case, to scream at his parents, to knock quietly on Keefe’s door in the middle of the night.